Nine or ten presidents did the right thing!

MONDAY, JANUARY 14, 2019

Would Donald J. Trump follow suit? For better or worse, it will be (at least) another week before the new year starts at this site.

Our new year will focus on "Aristotle's error." But for at least one additional week, the excitement will have to wait.

For today, we'll direct your attention to Michael Tomasky's column in today's New York Times. He lists the downsides to impeachment. On balance, we agree with his point of view.

We met Tomasky once or twice many moons ago; we liked the cut of his jib. That said, we think he skips an important point today. The problem is lurking here:

TOMASKY (1/14/19): While impeachment is clearly a valid exercise of power, so is another method of removal, also prescribed by the Constitution: an election. This is how Americans like to ditch presidents and parties they don’t like—presidential power has changed hands 44 times in this country’s history.

In addition, nine incumbent presidents have lost re-election, including three in the last half-century, and all have peacefully (if not always gracefully) yielded power. In contrast, only two presidents, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, have been impeached by the House, though both were acquitted in the Senate. Richard Nixon, facing certain and imminent impeachment, resigned.

That’s a historical record that suggests that an electoral outcome will be much more widely accepted. Mr. Trump’s partisans will whine about the unfairness of it all in either case—they’ll blame “voter fraud,” or George Soros, or the “fake news media.” But if the voters have rebuffed the president, the whining will sound to most Americans like just that.

We strongly agree with Tomasky's main point. Absent some devastating finding by Mueller—we refer to a demonstrated finding, not to a sensible allegation—impeachment would be deeply divisive, whether it was followed by removal from office or not.

A Trump defeat in 2020 would be a whole different barrel of worms. But here's the point we thought we saw Tomasky skip past:

Nine incumbent presidents have lost re-election and all have peacefully yielded power...Richard Nixon, facing certain and imminent impeachment, resigned.

Just for the record, Nixon was also facing likely removal.

Nine or ten presidents did the right thing. That said, do you feel certain that Donald J. Trump would follow suit?

We don't feel sure about that at all! Whistling past the question of possible mental illness/disorder, Tomasky fails to wonder or ask.

If Trump is facing electoral defeat next September, what might he choose to do? What if he's facing electoral defeat in a situation where leaving office might subject him to prosecution?

What could a president do, you might ask. A president with mental illness problems could do many things! Most obviously, he could start a war, then attempt to postpone the election.

You might say that the second part wouldn't work. That leaves the president starting a war—in the vernacular, wagging the dog. Meanwhile, how about if he starts a war next June to avoid falling behind in the polls? It might not work, but everyone knows that the country has tended to rally behind a president at the onset of war.

In Donald J. Trump crazy enough to do these things? We have no idea. If you feel sure that he isn't that bad, we'd like to take a big long gulp of the artichoke milk shake you're on.

We like the cut of Tomasky's jib. That said, as we read his column today, it almost seemed that he started to raise this point, then decided to hurry on past it.

How disordered is Donald J. Trump? In a very serious pinch, what sorts of things might he do?

This time last year, the Times said we mustn't discuss Trump's mental health. The rest of the press fell in line.

During 2017, Yale psychiatrist Bandy Lee had tried to raise these points of concern. Just like that, she got disappeared.

A note concerning our sources: We've consulted on these questions with the gloomy group we've long described as "future anthropologists huddled in caves." They communicate via a strange "time travel" technology born in the blasts of the conflagration they describe as Mister Trump's War.

The analysts report that Cassandra keeps raising these same points with them, always quite late at night. It sounds us like these earnest young people have simply been having bad dreams.

"I have long written about tie color!"

FRIDAY, JANUARY 11, 2019

Our highest elites at work: Because it deserves to live forever, we're going to give you David Leonhardt's statement to Rachel again. Here's what the Timesman actually said on Monday night's Maddow Show:

LEONHARDT (1/7/19): And, look, I'm not the biggest fan of George W. Bush's presidency, but George W. Bush remained a competent president to the end and he had none of the ethical issues that Trump does. And if you think about what Bush did in his last two years, he managed the disaster in Iraq responsibly, and he managed the financial crisis extremely responsibly.

I'm not saying he doesn't deserve blame for what happened before. But imagine Donald Trump trying to manage a natural disaster or a war or a financial crisis. I find it frightening and I worry we would look back and say, "How did we not get rid of him beforehand?"

Bush remained competent to the end! After all, he managed the disaster in Iraq responsibly—the disaster he himself caused!

Leonhardt said it, and Rachel just smiled. So it goes on the highest platforms maintained by our fallen elites.

Leonhardt is typically sold as one of the brightest players at the New York Times. What else gets said at the New York Times? This very morning, on page A2, Vanessa Friedman says this:

"I have long written about tie color, especially during debates..."

She has long written about tie color! Out of this manifest inanity, the possibility of Trump was born.

Just for the record, Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for the New York Times since March 2014. Sadly, she "received her undergraduate degree from Princeton," her company bio reports.

In today's essay, Friedman is defending her recent articles about Nancy Pelosi's clothes. On line, her fiery piece appears beneath these pugnacious, street-fightin' headlines:

Why Covering Nancy Pelosi’s Hot Pink Dress Isn’t Sexist
Our chief fashion critic says not to cover the speaker’s style choices would be irresponsible.

You see, Friedman has been criticized for frisking Pelosi's clothes. This morning, her act of self-defense starts off like this:

FRIEDMAN (1/11/19): Last month, when Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, first met with President Trump about funding for a border wall, I wrote an article about the burnt orange MaxMara coat Ms. Pelosi wore when she exited the White House, which had set social media aflame.

The story reached a huge audience, but not everyone was happy. One irritated reader tweeted, “Would a man’s suit get this much ink?”

Given that I have written about President Trump’s suits, Jeb Bush’s shirtsleeves and Marco Rubio’s shoes, my answer is yes.

As she continues, Friedman defends herself against charges of sexism by noting the fact that she also wastes everyone's time with endless, brain-damaged ruminations about male politicians' clothes. That brings us to her defining claim:

"I have long written about tie color." Also, about various male politicians' shirtsleeves, suits and shoes!

She's written about tie color for years! According to that pair of headlines, it would be "irresponsible" not to.

In fairness to Friedman, let's start with a comment about the readers who charged her with sexism. Simply put, it isn't true that writers like Friedman restrict themselves to the wardrobe selections of our female pols.

No one's wardrobe ever got frisked more extensively than that of Candidate Gore. His boots, his suits, his polo shirts; the height at which he hemmed his pants; the fact that one of his suits was "earth toned;" the number of buttons on his suit jackets; the obvious fact that three-button suits constituted a sick approach to female voters—all these ridiculous claims, and more, were advanced by the criminal minds who sent George W. Bush to the White House, where he performed so well.

How sick are these prehuman stars, who run on the fuel of Professor Harari's gossip and fiction? Below, you see a Washington Post Pulitzer winner after Gore and Bradley staged their first Democratic debate in October 1999.

The candidates focused on health care. Children are dead all over the world because our nation's highest elites function in this puzzling way:

MCGRORY (10/31/99): Vice President Albert Gore came to his fateful encounter with newly menacing challenger Bill Bradley carrying heavy baggage. He was wearing an outfit that added to his problems when he stepped onstage at Dartmouth College: a brown suit, a gunmetal blue shirt, a red tie—and black boots.

Was it part of his reinvention strategy? Perhaps it was meant to be a ground-leveling statement—"I am not a well-dressed man." It is hard to imagine that he thought to ingratiate himself with the nation's earliest primary voters by trying to look like someone seeking employment at a country music radio station. Maybe it was the first step in shedding his Prince Albert image.

The debate had focused on health care, including the nation's sick children. The slugs who pose as the nation's journalists could only respond like that.

(How had they behaved in the press room at Dartmouth? Thanks in part to a phone call from Hanover immediately after the debate, we were able to tell you! To acquaint yourselves with the soul of the beast, you can just click here.)

Readers swore that writers like Friedman only discuss the clothing of female pols. That's because they themselves are pre-rational beings. They work live and direct from tribal narrative (Harari's "fictions"), not from observation of real life as actually lived here on Earth.

Meanwhile, our meritocratic elites live and die with their ultimate piffle. Bush was competent to the end! Meanwhile, the Friedmans will be writing like this until the advent of Mister Trump's War, the war they created in thirty years of utter drivel and meritocratic failure.

This is who our elites actually are. When our new year starts at this site, we'll be examining this phenomenon from a wide array of angles.

"I have long written about tie color!" Friedman's statement should go on the tombstone, the one our disordered president is fashioning for our failed western world.

Also this: Was it the best sex you ever had?

That was multimillionaire Diane Sawyer, asking Marla Maples, long ago, about getting it on with The Donald.

This is who and what they are. This is what they care about. We leave you today with the coming year's question:

Are they "rational animals?" Or is that Aristotle's error, committed long ago?

The skill levels of our highest elites!

THURSDAY, JANUARY 10, 2019

The meritocracy's ongoing fail: No one loves "Einstein made easy" pseudo-discussion quite the way Nova does.

The PBS series loves to pretend that it knows how to make Einstein easy! This week, it's back with its latest hour-long effort, Einstein's Quantum Riddle.

The people at Nova have gone there again! At Nova's site, the new program is promoed like this:

Einstein's Quantum Riddle
Join scientists as they grab light from across the universe to prove quantum entanglement is real.

In effect, this program tries to make quantum mechanics and "entanglement" easy. We haven't watched the whole program yet, but today we'll give you a taste.

Fairly early in the program, the narrator introduces the famous 1927 Solvay Conference, "an amazing week-long series of discussions on, really, what the world was made of, on the nature of matter and the new quantum theory."

That said, what the heck was quantum theory? As the exposition starts, confusion quickly appears:

NARRATOR (1/9/19): This was one of the greatest meetings of minds in history. More than half were or would become Nobel Prize winners. Their experiments were showing that deep inside matter, tiny particles, like atoms and their orbiting electrons were not solid little spheres. They seemed fuzzy and undefined.

DAVID KAISER: So this, this group here, these, these were the folks who had just been plumbing deeper and deeper and deeper to find what they hoped would be a bedrock of what the world is made of. And, to their surprise, they found things less and less solid as they dug in.

This world was not tiny little bricks that got smaller and smaller. At some point, the bricks gave way to this "moosh" and what looked like solidity, solidness, in fact became very confusing and, kind of, a whole new way of thinking about nature.

To his credit, Kaiser notes that the early findings had been "very confusing." That said. almost one hundred years later, confusion seems to remain in what the narrator offers.

To wit:

If the "tiny particles" deep inside matter aren't "solid little spheres" after all—if they seem "fuzzy and undefined" in some rather undefined way—then why exactly are we still calling them "particles?"

Presumably, someone can answer that question. But as the discussion continues, we'd say the confusion only grows, though viewers are encouraged to believe that everything's being made amazingly clear.

(To peruse the whole transcript or watch the whole program, you can just click here.)

In our view, there's no bad explanation quite like an Einstein-made-easy bad explanation. Nova churns them out on an annual basis, and we the highly educated PBS viewers apparently keep tuning in.

No one at Nova, and no one at home, ever seems to realize that the easy-to-understand explanations are almost wholly impenetrable. It'a a bit like the old joke offered by an apocryphal worker in the old Soviet Union:

"We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us."

So it goes with these Nova programs. We pretend to understand and they pretend to explain things! (Or so a wry viewer might say.)

Nova has never made Einstein easy in its whole institutional life! Despite this fact, the jumbled "explanations" keep coming, and we viewers keep tuning in.

So it goes in other precincts among our meritocratic elites. Most especially, so it has been, for many years, within our political discourse, which has been built around wardrobe and hair issues, routinely embellished pseudo-quotations, and the always important question of who's been zoomin' who, perhaps ten years ago.

In this post, Josh Marshall describes the New York Times' latest front-page howler. Everybody makes mistakes, but this one's a groaner, Josh says.

Then too, there's what the Times' David Leonhardt told us rubes this week. He's promoted as one of the Times' brightest players, but on Monday evening's Maddow Show, the gentleman actually said this:

LEONHARDT (1/7/19): And, look, I'm not the biggest fan of George W. Bush's presidency, but George W. Bush remained a competent president to the end and he had none of the ethical issues that Trump does. And if you think about what Bush did in his last two years, he managed the disaster in Iraq responsibly, and he managed the financial crisis extremely responsibly.

I'm not saying he doesn't deserve blame for what happened before. But imagine Donald Trump trying to manage a natural disaster or a war or a financial crisis. I find it frightening and I worry we would look back and say, "How did we not get rid of him beforehand?"

Leonhardt isn't a fan of Bush, but Bush was competent to the end! He managed the disaster in Iraq responsibly—the disaster he himself caused!

Leonhardt said it; Rachel didn't challenge it. After three or four decades of similar clowning, work like this from our empty elites gave us the president who is eventually going to start Mister Trump's Inevitable War. Or so Cassandra has told the analysts, in a series of late-night visits.

Tomorrow, we'll look at Leonhardt's column from last Sunday about the sins of Trump. Not to be gloomy, but the hapless work of our meritocratic elites have taken us from the valley of the shadow of earth toned suits all the way to our current sick ugly dumb deeply dangerous brain-dead mess.

Ain't meritocracy grand? And where are our greatest logicians?

A reading lesson from today's Times!

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 9, 2019

Manafort versus "the Trump campaign:" It's a reading lesson from above the fold on the front page—on page A1—of today's New York Times.

On line, the Times begins with a bungled headline. Three reporters take over from there:

LAFRANIERE, VOGEL AND HABERMAN (1/9/19): Manafort Accused of Sharing Trump Polling Data With Russian Associate

As a top official in President Trump’s campaign, Paul Manafort shared political polling data with a business associate tied to Russian intelligence, according to a court filing unsealed on Tuesday. The document provided the clearest evidence to date that the Trump campaign may have tried to coordinate with Russians during the 2016 presidential race.

Mr. Manafort’s lawyers made the disclosure by accident, through a formatting error in a document filed to respond to charges that he had lied to prosecutors working for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, after agreeing to cooperate with their investigation into Russian interference in the election.

Regarding that headline, sad! The front-page report doesn't say that Manafort has been accused of sharing polling data with a Russian associate. It says he did share polling data, according to a "disclosure" in a document filed by his own legal team.

Presumably, some editor composed a slapdash, inaccurate headline, one which moved from a "disclosure" to someone being "accused." That said, our lesson concerns the second sentence in paragraph one, a sentence which goes like this:

"The document provided the clearest evidence to date that the Trump campaign may have tried to coordinate with Russians during the 2016 presidential race."

That sentence is highly equivocal—needlessly so, in fact. That said, does the document in question provide any evidence that the Trump campaign coordinated with Russians? Or does it simply show that Manafort did? (Along with Rick Gates, his right-hand man.)

We ask for an obvious reason. As everybody knows, and as the reporters later note, it's widely understood that Manafort was "deeply in debt" to Oleg Deripaska, an (allegedly dangerous) Russian oligarch for whom the polling data seems to have been intended.

For many months, it has been widely reported and suggested that Manafort was trying to use his role in the Trump campaign as a way to make himself whole with Deripaska. This suggests an obvious possibility, one the Times reporters mention in paragraphs 5 and 6:

LAFRANIERE, VOGEL AND HABERMAN: “This is the closest thing we have seen to collusion,” Clint Watts, a senior fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said of the data-sharing. “The question now is, did the president know about it?”

The document gave no indication of whether Mr. Trump was aware of the data transfer or how Mr. Kilimnik might have used the information. But from March to August 2016, when Mr. Manafort worked for the Trump campaign, Russia was engaged in a full-fledged operation using social media, stolen emails and other tactics to boost Mr. Trump, attack Mrs. Clinton and play on divisive issues such as race and guns. Polling data could conceivably have helped Russia hone those messages and target audiences to help swing votes to Mr. Trump.

Is it possible that Manafort was playing this game as a one-man operation? Of course it is! If that's the case, how wise was it to start this report by talking about possibility that "the Trump campaign" had been "trying to coordinate with Russians?" Were the reporters possibly moving beyond what they actually knew?

We cast ourselves in the buzzkill role for an obvious reason. The liberal world is deeply in love with trying to lock "the Trump campaign" up. On liberal corporate cable, tribal entertainers havebecome expert at overstating every suggestion or indication, all in service to the desire to say or suggest that they've finally been caught.

We love to get out over our skis; we hate the idea of waiting for full information. It seemed to us that the Times reporters were playing that game in their opening paragraph, the paragraph which appears beneath the headline which some editor blew.

As Professor Harari has noted, we humans love to move beyond what we actually know! We thought of that fact when we read this later passage:

LAFRANIERE, VOGEL AND HABERMAN: Both Mr. Manafort and Rick Gates, the deputy campaign manager, transferred the data to Mr. Kilimnik in the spring of 2016 as Mr. Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination, according to a person knowledgeable about the situation. Most of the data was public, but some of it was developed by a private polling firm working for the campaign, according to the person.

Say what? Most of the polling data in question was drawn from public sources?

If true, that suggests that Manafort, an inveterate scammer, was possibly trying to scam his Russian associates with publicly available data. More to the point, we've already seen at least one major cable pundit say the data in question "must have been" private, proprietary data because there would be no need to pass on public data.

We're sorry to say that the miscreant was Frank Figliuzzi. He spoke to Brian Williams:

FIGLIUZZI (1/8/19): I always like it when we accidentally learn things, Brian. Sometimes it's the best kind of learning when knowledge falls into your lap and we get a little bit smarter about what's up with the Trump campaign.

So today, we're faced with a question. Why would the campaign chairman for President Trump be providing what must have been internal poll data? Why do I say "must have been?" The Russians don't need to get public poll data from Manafort. They can read that in the newspapers.

So here is this kind of proprietary poll data going to a Russian that everyone believes is at least connected to the GRU. But in looking at his bio, I think he might have been a GRU officer at one time. And what would the expectation be? He's not going to go home and stick the polling data on his refrigerator. He`s going to do something with it.

The Times report had been on line for hours. Figliuzzi blew past what it actually said, and Brian didn't correct him. So much for the lofty goal of "getting a little bit smarter!"

This is the service corporate cable provides. In similar ways, these entities defeated Candidate Gore and Candidate Hillary Clinton, back when anger about Bill Clinton's sex acts was the biggest thing in their world. It's how we got Bush, then Trump, though you'll never be told that.

Above the fold on page A1, should the Times have jumped from "Manafort" to "the Trump campaign?" We'd say an editor should have worked with that. That said, to assess the caliber of one editor's work, take a look at that misstated headline.

On balance, our upper-end political press corps just isn't especially sharp. This has been a major problem for decades, but our upper-end mainstream guild doesn't discuss itself.

Trump may have known about this matter, of course. That said, there's still no way to know. Rather than wait for the facts to emerge, some will improve the tale.

Leonhardt warns of external events!

TUESDAY, JANUARY 8, 2019

Top children imagine no evil: This may be the night when Donald J. Trump will unveil his national emergency.

That said, why not look on the bright side just once? Almost surely, the president isn't ready, at least not yet, to declare his dispositive war.

Future anthropologists, huddled in caves, have told us that war is approaching. They tell us this in nightly visits which remind some cynics of dreams.

That said, this won't be the night when the apparently crazy president unveils his inevitable war. But alas! Last night, on the Maddow Show, the New York Times' David Leonhardt made it clear that he isn't yet ready to imagine such a thing.

Leonhardt spoke with the liberal world's biggest corporate fraud. As they pictured what Trump might someday do, here's what he and the fraudster said:

MADDOW (1/7/19): Do you think that some of the danger that you're describing there, some of the increased danger, is because of the president's increased liability in terms of the investigations that surround him?

LEONHARDT: Yes.

MADDOW: Because they lead him into a more desperate situation.

LEONHARDT: Yes. And I think there was this fiction that existed for awhile. It was sort of—it was unprovable, there was a fiction, until the midterms, that he was politically invulnerable, that somehow he had a magic sauce, right, and he would defy the polls. And then we saw the midterms and he got trounced.

I mean, the Senate is tricky to look at, because so many of the races were on Republican soil. But in the House, the Democrats won the national House by 9 percentage points. He got trounced.

And so, I think what you're starting to see is he realizes he has some vulnerability. Republicans realize he has some vulnerability. And Mueller seems to be, to one degree or another, closing in. And so, what I worry about are one, as Mueller continues to close in, or as he fights for his re-election, he could do many worse things.

I also think we are not paying attention to the possibility that something terrible external happens—a war, a financial crisis, a terrorist attack, a terrible national—

MADDOW: A non-self-inflicted externality.

LEONHARDT: Yes....

To watch the whole segment, click here.

In that exchange, you're observing the blinkered work of the meritocratic dreck the sea keeps dragging in.

Just look what these schoolchildren said! First, with Mueller closing in, Trump might do something terrible.

Trump might do something terrible! Then too, there's always this:

At some point, he might have to confront "a non-self-inflicted externality," for example an external war!

Neither of these major stars was willing to say the obvious. Neither would say that Donald J. Trump might decide to start a war to create a distraction or an emergency if Mueller's hordes start closing in. They simply weren't willing to think about that. They're well-behaved boys and girls!

Meanwhile, look where Leonhardt went next. Where in the world—where do earth—do they find these "well-educated" pearls?

MADDOW (continuing from above): A non-self-inflicted externality.

LEONHARDT: Yes. And, look, I'm not the biggest fan of George W. Bush's presidency, but George W. Bush remained a competent president to the end and he had none of the ethical issues that Trump does. And if you think about what Bush did in his last two years, he managed the disaster in Iraq responsibly, and he managed the financial crisis extremely responsibly.

I'm not saying he doesn't deserve blame for what happened before. But imagine Donald Trump trying to manage a natural disaster or a war or a financial crisis. I find it frightening and I worry we would look back and say, "How did we not get rid of him beforehand?"

Where do they find these broken toys, these children who step forth to say that George W. Bush—the man their guild propelled into office—"managed the Iraq disaster competently," the disaster which he himself caused?

Where do they find these broken toys, these skillful singers of self? In the case of Leonhardt, Maddow found him on the front page of last weekend's Sunday Review, where he'd penned this lengthy column about the problems with Trump.

Tomorrow, we'll turn to that column. Work like this, from our brightest boys, helps us know how Donald J. Trump ended up in the Oval Office, not unlike Bush before him.

Tomorrow: Leonhardt's column

Von Drehle flirts with the ultimate question!

MONDAY, JANUARY 7, 2019

Flirts, then rushes off: We'll still be on part-time duty this week. As it now turns out, the new year at this award-winning site won't be starting until Monday, January 14.

We're looking forward to a new focus for the new year. But that new year won't start till next week.

For today, we want to direct your attention to yesterday's column by David Von Drehle, he of the Washington Post.

Good God! As he started, it seemed that Von Drehle was actually pulling the trigger! From his headline right through his opening paragraphs, it seemed that he was going to ask The Question The Press Corps Won't Ask.

Here's the way the column started, eye-catching headline included:

VON DREHLE (1/7/19): Let's talk to Trump's psychiatrist

The customary tsk-tsks and vapors erupted when President Trump opined on the state of mind of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) during a New Year's Eve interview on Fox News. Asked whether Warren thinks she can beat him in 2020, Trump replied, "You'd have to ask her psychiatrist."

Trump's critics are so reflexively critical at this point that they can't recognize a great idea when they hear it. By all means, let's ask Warren's psychiatrist—but let's not stop with Warren. To the couch, Mr. President!

Playing off Donald J. Trump's ten millionth recent dumb remark, Von Drehle almost seemed to be heading toward a rumination on the state of the president's mental health!

Granted, he'd adopted a somewhat comical tone. But as he continued, he actually offered this:

VON DREHLE (continuing directly): Love or hate him (or anything in between), no reasonable person can deny that Trump is a textbook example of narcissistic personality disorder. Reading the list of symptoms on the Mayo Clinic's website is like scrolling through the president's Twitter: "Require constant, excessive admiration," "exaggerate achievements and talents," "be preoccupied with . . . brilliance, beauty or the perfect mate," "monopolize conversations and belittle . . . people," "expect special favors and unquestioning compliance," "have an inability or unwillingness to recognize the needs and feelings of others."

"Trump is a textbook example of narcissistic personality disorder?" To appearances, Von Drehle was throwing the so-called "Goldwater rule" under a refurbished version of the bus which once was known as the old Straight Talk Express.

It sounded like Von Drehle was prepared to address the possibility that Trump is "mentally ill" in some way! That would be a tricky and difficult conversation, but it almost seemed that Von Drehle was going there.

Sorry! As his column proceeds, Von Drehle pivots toward some straight-up funnin'. Soon, he's using such clinical terms as "cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs," and he's offering the tired old saw according to which anyone who reaches the White House has to be basically nuts. After all, look out for those daddy issues!

VON DREHLE: I've long believed that most presidents could keep a shrink working overtime. Imagine trying to heal Thomas Jefferson's bifurcated personality: half slavekeeper, half apostle of freedom. Did James Madison's tiny stature have anything to do with his blustering and blundering into war? Might Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan have avoided the Civil War if the first had been sober and the second free to express his apparent homosexuality?

And the daddy issues. Oh, my. Andrew Jackson never knew his father. Abraham Lincoln disdained his, coolly refusing to attend Thomas Lincoln's funeral. Franklin D. Roosevelt was a teenager when his invalid father died, and his domineering mother kept him on an allowance even in the White House. John F. Kennedy was, like his brothers, a product of his father's inexhaustible ambitions. Lyndon B. Johnson was haunted by his father's failures; Richard M. Nixon by his father's abusiveness; Ronald Reagan by his father's alcoholism. Bill Clinton never met his father, and Barack Obama's was almost entirely absent after the boy's toddler years.

And would any president other than George W. Bush have been as eager to turn 9/11 into a crusade to oust Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator left in power by Bush's more cautious father?

By all accounts, Trump was the apple of his father's eye, and yet the president has spent his career trying to escape his Outer Borough roots and deny his debts to dad.

At this point, I wonder whether anyone who's not a bit off-kilter has what it takes to win and inhabit the awesome, awful office of the presidency...

Bill Clinton never met his father. Indeed, even Obama is nuts!

In fact, you have to be nuts just to win the job! So Von Drehle says as he runs off and hides in the fringe of the woods.

The Goldwater rule always seemed like a good journalistic idea. Then, we got a president who, based on appearances, actually does seem to be some version of "mentally ill."

Von Drehle started by noting this fact, then turned straight to the funnin'. So it goes as our upper-end press corps averts its gaze from our roll toward the conflagration known to future anthropologists huddled in caves as "Mister Trump's Dispositive War."

Could it be that Donald J. Trump really is some version of "mentally ill?" Given such indications as those Von Drehle lists, we think that's the main question the modern "press" must confront.

Tomorrow, we'll visit the featured column on the front page of yesterday's New York Times' Sunday Review. As we do, we'll be exploring another way to avoid this ultimate question.

This is how bad our corporate side gets!

SATURDAY, JANUARY 5, 2019

Carlson gets to be right: We liberals! Our corporate cable side gets dumber and uglier by the day. Below, you see the sort of behavior in which Don Lemon and CNN now traffic.

Rick Wilson did the honors. For the record, Wilson gets booked on tribal cable to do precisely this sort of thing:

LEMON (1/3/19): So, is [Nancy Pelosi] right, Rick, about the president's motives here? This wall is just to keep his base's attention of everything else.

WILSON: Sure. Of course. But Don, the wall has always been a con for Donald Trump's credulous rube ten-tooth base. The wall has always been a scam. It has always been a lie. Nothing about the wall has ever been real. And Donald Trump knows it.

Wilson gets booked to provide such pleasures to our base—to make us laugh about "Donald Trump's ten-tooth base." This is the soul now of Lemon.

How bad does it get on our own cable side? So bad that, one night later, Tucker Carlson got to be right concerning this tribal garbage.

He started with these accurate statements about Wilson:

CARLSON (1/4/19): Now, Wilson is a semi-obscure consultant who has held just enough low-level political jobs that cable television producers can bill him as a "Republican strategist."

Wilson seems to spend most of his life opining in one of those six-guest shout-fests in boxes that the other channels specialize in. He's often shouting the loudest. What makes Wilson notable is—like so many on the left—he moved on from hating Trump to hating the people who voted for Trump, which is to say a lot of the country.”

Those were accurate comments about Wilson, a low-level slug who is now adored by our own tribe's cable bookers. After playing the tape of the "ten-tooth" remark, Carlson went on to say this:

CARLSON: "His ten-tooth base!" Imagine mocking people who can’t afford to fix their rotting teeth. There are a lot of people like that in this country still, and many of them did vote for Donald Trump in the hope he would care about them or not rub their faces in their own poverty. What a cruel and awful thing to say.

Did it ever occur to Rick Wilson that people are losing their teeth might benefit from cheaper dental care? Maybe Washington could help with that? But no, it’s easier to make fun of them and get rich doing it, something that Wilson specializes in.

For the record, no one on any cable channel talks about cheaper dental or medical care outside the (very limited) context of some particular two-party fight. To all intents and purposes, discussion of such topics is essentially forbidden even at the New York Times. For reasons our corporate stars won't discuss, such discussions have long been verboten.

Meanwhile, people watching the other channel get to see our own cable stars behaving as Wilson did. Then they see Carlson making perfectly accurate statements about the manifest ugliness to which corporate creeps like Lemon have now descended.

Carlson went on to critique Wilson's mandated remarks about the racism of Trump's voters. Being a man of taste and class, Wilson tweeted a thoughtful reply:

Spare me the phony drama. This is just one more example of how the MAGA tough guy crowd are the most delicate, whiny, punk-ass PC snowflakes ever created. They trash talk everyone else, and love Trump’s constant insults, vulgarities, and divisiveness but the minute the heat gets turned up they run to Mommy.

Within the garbage-strewn mind of Wilson, he's simply "turning up the heat" when he starts counting the teeth of the other tribe's voters. This is the person our side now loves, at least on the corporate side.

How much does Lemon get paid to peddle this dreck? You aren't allowed to know that.

For extra credit only: Three weeks back, in the Sunday Outlook section, the Washington Post's Carlos Lozada reviewed some recent books by Wilson and his kind. Here are some of his comments on Wilson:

LOZADA (12/16/18): Wilson, a veteran Republican campaign strategist, cops to "a stirring bit of guilt" for his role in creating the "Frankenstein monster" that became the Republican base in the Obama years...[But] he spends nearly all 300-plus pages of his book blaming everyone else for the outcome of his experiment.

And he does so in the crudest terms. First there is Trump, whom Wilson never ceases to insult...He also trashes the Trump fans within the base he helped shape: "I know you're in an oxy stupor much of the time, so I'll try to move slowly and not use big words." Wilson attacks Reince Priebus, Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz and Mike Pence, and he says Newt Gingrich "started twerking [for Trump] faster than a five-buck stripper." Such sexualized put-downs abound in Wilson's book. White House adviser Stephen Miller "needs to spend a week getting laid." Wilson finds Trump campaign adviser Carter Page "reeking of late-stage virginity." And the white-nationalist alt-right movement is a bunch of "pudgy white boys from lower-middle-class suburbs who couldn't find a woman's clitoris with a GPS and a magnifying glass."

This is the slimy fellow our tribe's corporate bookers now seem to adore. This is the shape of the sexual politics Over Here, within our own tents, on our own self-impressed side.

(Wilson performed for Lemon on Wednesday and Thursday nights. On Thursday night, he performed for Lemon at 10 PM, for Brian Williams at 11. Last night he performed for Anderson Cooper. His is the garbage our corporate bookers very much seem to like.)

A book which conveys a powerful point!

FRIDAY, JANUARY 4, 2019

In search of a bed just so: We don't expect to have any fish today. That said, we expect to start our long-awaited, award-winning new year at the start of next week.

As we wait for Mister Trump's War, our framework for the year will be "Aristotle's error." Eventually, we'll be discussing the low-tech techniques of clarification which emerged from the later Wittgenstein's work.

For today, we'll recommend a children's book which came to mind in recent weeks. It's one of the most instructive books we encountered during our years as a grade school teacher.

It's Jeanne Hardendorff's short picture book, The Bed Just So. The book is no longer in print, but thanks to the wonders of YouTube, you can listen as a young person reads the whole thing, letting you look at the pictures.

(Reading time: a bit over four minutes.)

What happens in The Bed Just So? Google Books limns it thusly:

"A tailor gets no sleep until he finds a comfortable bed for a hudgin that has come to live with him."

A hudgin seems to be a very small, highly querulous type of gremlin. The story teaches a valuable lesson about the difference between the things we think will serve our needs, as opposed to the surprising things which may actually make us happy.

The hudgin's in search of a bed just so! In related news:

You can buy all the storebought cat beds you like. Your cat will still sleep on your socks.

Lawrence O'Donnell on Donald J. Trump!

THURSDAY, JANUARY 3, 2019

Again, the road not taken: In his first segment on last night's Last Word, Lawrence O'Donnell ambled down 2018's most important road not taken.

He was discussing Donald J. Trump. This is what he said:

O'DONNELL (1/2/19): Well, in his first public speaking of the new year, today the president of the United States revealed that the 27 psychiatrists and mental health professionals who call out in the book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump are right, that Donald Trump's condition is obviously getting worse.

Now, all of us in middle age and above find ourselves spending more and more time looking for our keys. There's some neurological decline that's absolutely inevitable over time, can't escape it. But Donald Trump's is dramatic. If you thought that his pathological lying could not become more pathological or that he could not become more delusional, you were wrong and the mental health professionals who told us he would are right.

Here is a sample of President Trump's 2019 mental process...

To watch the whole segment, click here.

Lawrence went on to offer some unconvincing, poorly conceived examples of Trump's "mental process," which is allegedly "more pathological" this year. After presenting his slipshod examples, the cable star offered this:

O'DONNELL: And so, the president's delusion is getting worse, much worse. Or at least his willingness to publicly display his delusion is getting even worse now as he ages and as we enter a New Year.

Is the president's "mental process," "delusion" or "condition" actually getting worse? In his lazy opening burst, Lawrence illustrated some of the potential problems with the most important road the mainstream press corps chose not to take last year.

For starters, what's The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, the book to which Lawrence refers? Due to the mainstream press corps' road not taken, it's very possible you've never heard about this book on cable news.

What's the book to which Lawrence refers? The leading authority on the book describes it thusly:

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump is a 2017 book, edited by Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist, containing essays from 27 psychologists, psychiatrists, and mental health professionals on the "clear and present danger" that U.S. President Donald Trump's mental health poses to the "nation and individual well being." They argued that the president's mental health was affecting the mental health of the people of the United States and that he places the country at grave risk of involving it in a war and of undermining democracy itself because of his pathological narcissism and sociopathy. Consequently, Trump's presidency represents an emergency not only allowing, but perhaps also requiring, psychiatrists to deviate from the American Psychiatric Association's Goldwater rule, which holds that it is unethical for psychiatrists to give professional opinions about public figures without examining them in person.

Bandy Lee is a Yale psychiatrist. She tried to start a public discussion through the publication of this book, which has been widely ignored.

Lee actually knows what she's talking about. But as we've told you in the past, the New York Times editorial board decided that mainstream journalists mustn't discuss these topics, except of course at cocktail parties speaking among themselves. In January 2018, they wrote an editorial to that effect, and everyone rushed into line.

Is Donald Trump's "mental health" a danger to the nation and the world? Is it possible that he's actually suffering from such conditions as "pathological narcissism" and "sociopathy?"

It seems to us that those are very obvious pressing questions. But the Times said the topic must be ignored, and everyone fell into line.

On its face, that seems like a bad journalistic decision. That said, Lawrence shows us what would have happened if a different approach had obtained.

His examples last night were silly and unconvincing, except by the grading standards of cable entertainment. Beyond that, he wandered the countryside, trying and failing to define what he was talking about.

Was he talking about type of cognitive impairment? Was he talking about "mental illness" of some type? It was very unclear from his presentation. But such is the way of partisan cable.

The press decided to take a pass on the emperor's new mental condition. Had they decided to tackle the topic, they almost surely would have done so sloppily, lazily, poorly.

In large part, we got to our current dangerous place through the lazy work of these feckless types over the past thirty years. There's no sign the quality of their work will improve in this entertaining new year.

Segregated schools in New York City!

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 2, 2019

Our new year begins next week: With apologies, we'll be extending our holiday break through the start of next week. We're attending to some personal matters. And when have you seen us do that?

For today, you might want to peruse this recent report from New York Magazine concerning the desire to reduce "segregation" in New York City's "specialized" (academically high-powered) public high schools. We were struck by a fairly obvious possible step the author doesn't seem to consider. We expect to discuss this report next week, but can you see what the possible missing step is?

We expect to return full time next Monday. We'll propose a new focus for a new year:

You've heard of Alexander's ragtime band, but have you heard of "Aristotle's error?" As we wait for the trump to hit the fan, we expect to start our new year with that framework next week.

No fish today!

MONDAY, DECEMBER 31, 2018

It's New Year's Eve: We've recently learned that it's New Year's Eve. For that reason, there will be no fish today.

No fish today, or tomorrow! But astounding new product awaits.

Native American kids in school!

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2018

From today's front page: How are Native American kids doing in school?

Atop the fold on today's front page, the New York Times attempts to explain. We don't think the Times did the world's greatest job. Let's start with some basic data.

The Times focuses on Wolf Point High School, a small school in rural Montana. In fact, Wolf Point High is quite small. In the 2015-16 school year, total enrollment seems to have been 217 for grades 9-12.

In that particular year, 57 percent of the students were listed as Native American; 19 percent of the students were listed as white. Another 19 percent were listed as "two or more races." These elementary facts about this small school don't appear in the Times report.

As Green and Waldman begin their report, they focus on one student at Wolf Point High. This student has had major psychological difficulties, including attempts at suicide.

Stating the obvious, this young person deserves to be helped in every way possible. Quickly, though, the Times uses her difficulties as a way to provide this overview:

GREEN AND WALDMAN (12/29/18): Her despondency is shared by other Native students at Wolf Point and across the United States. Often ignored in the national conversation about the public school achievement gap, these students post some of the worst academic outcomes of any demographic group, which has been exacerbated by decades of discrimination, according to federal reports.

Native American kids "post some of the worst academic outcomes of any demographic group?" We wondered how bad the academic outcomes actually are for these kids.

In our view, the Times does its usual slapdash job explaining that basic point. Here are the most recent and most basic data, derived from our most reliable domestic testing program:

Average scores, Grade 8 math, 2017 Naep
All students: 281.96
White students: 292.16
Black students: 259.60
Hispanic students: 268.49
Asian-American students: 309.52
American Indian/Native Alaskan students: 268.24

Average scores, Grade 8 reading, 2017 Naep
All students: 265.33
White students: 273.75
Black students: 248.37
Hispanic students: 254.60
Asian-American students: 281.19
American Indian/Native Alaskan students: 252.71

For all Naep data, start here.

For many years, we routinely offered some very rough rules of thumb for interpreting the size of those "achievement gaps" on the Naep. Finally understanding the way our society works, we no longer waste our time doing things like that.

We'll only note a few basic facts. According to our most reliable data, our black kids are doing less well, on average, in reading and math than our Native American kids.

According to those Naep results, the gap in math is almost one year! This is a very basic fact, one which is missing from the Times report.

Meanwhile, our Hispanic kids are doing about as well, on average, as our Native American kids. As the Times entertains and pleases readers with tales about the mistreatment of Native American kids, we'd say its readers should have been given this basic frame of reference.

What explains the punishing achievement gaps which obtain, on average, between various groups of American kids? That's a very important question, one which is typically submerged beneath pleasing novelized narratives like the one which appears today, in which a small rural school full of fallible people is novelized as the cause of children attempting to kill themselves.

In our view, the despair which has children taking, or attempting to take, their own lives deserves a much more serious treatment than the one which appears today. That said, New York Times education reporting has long been a novelized rolling disgrace. We're fed the stories which make us feel good, which play to preferred tribal narratives.

Why don't Native kids do better in school? We'd love to see a serious attempt to address that deeply important question.

That said, our black kids, on average, are actually doing somewhat worse than our Native American kids, even after decades of improvement! This is a very basic, very important fact of American life. Nowhere in today's report did the pair of Times reporters provide this basic frame of reference.

A second perspective: At one point, the Times reporters manage to state some basic facts. We'll guess that very few readers knew the highlighted facts:

GREEN AND WALDMAN: While the Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Education runs about 180 Native-only schools, more than 90 percent of Native students attend integrated public schools near or on reservations, like Wolf Point. A wealth of rarely tapped data documents their plight.

In public schools, white students are twice as likely as Native students to take at least one advanced placement course, and Native students are more than twice as likely to be suspended, according to an analysis of federal civil rights data conducted by ProPublica and The New York Times. Native students also score lower than nearly all other demographic groups on national tests, and only 72 percent of Native students graduate, the lowest of any demographic group.

The vast majority of Native American kids attend "integrated public schools near or on reservations." A much smaller percentage attend "Native-only schools" run by the Bureau of Indian Education (BIE).

Most Times readers wouldn't have known that. For ourselves, we clicked one of the Times reporters' links. Wading through a lengthy report, we saw some remarkably terrible data from those BIE schools.

The report in question was issued by the Obama administration in December 2014. It offered this overview concerning those two types of schools for Native American kids:

OBAMA ADMIN REPORT (12/14): The vast majority of Native students—92 percent—attend local public schools operated by state and local educational authorities. States have a responsibility to educate all students who live within the state’s borders, including students who are members of Indian tribes. The other 8 percent of Native students—approximately 41,600—are enrolled in 183 federally-funded Bureau of Indian Education schools. These schools are located on 63 reservations in 23 states.

According to this Obama Admin report, only eight percent of Native kids were attending those BIE schools. (Wolf Point High is not a BIE school.)

That said, those BIE schools seem to produce extremely low test scores. These are the data which appear within, or can be derived from, that 2014 report (see graphic, page 16):

Average scores, Grade 4 reading, 2013 Naep
All students: 220.67
White students: 230.91
Black students: 205.13
Hispanic students: 206.54
Asian-American students: 236.53
American Indian/Native Alaskan students: 205.97
Students at BIE schools: roughly 180

Judging from the Obama Administration report, Native American kids at BIE schools were producing much lower test scores than their Native American peers at locally-run schools.

The achievement gap there was very large. What is, or isn't, taking place at those BIE schools?

Coming Monday: These presidential historians today!

The fraudulence comes to Fergus Falls!

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 28, 2018

It was widespread long before: We'll return tomorrow to Donald Trump's alleged bone spurs and to These Presidential Historians Today.

More specifically, we'll review what Michael Beschloss recently said. We think there's a point to be made.

That said, there are several obvious points to be drawn from the front-page report in today's New York Times concerning Fergus Falls.

Fergus Falls is a town of roughly 14,000 souls in west central Minnesota, trending toward the Dakotas. As is now being widely discussed, the fraudulence arrived in Fergus Falls in the aftermath of Donald J. Trump's 46 percent win in the 2016 White House election.

Warning! Trump got 64 percent of the vote in Otter Tail County, of which Fergus Falls is the county seat. This made Fergus Falls a natural target for the sort of fraudulence which is widespread among our race.

Matt Furber and Mitch Smith describe the fraud today. The fraudulence came from a major newspaper from Over There. The Times report starts like this:

FURBER AND SMITH (12/29/18): Claas Relotius, who spent weeks reporting in Fergus Falls last year for one of Europe’s most respected publications, could have written about the many residents who maintain friendships across partisan lines, about the efforts to lure former residents back to west-central Minnesota or about how a city of roughly 14,000 people maintains a robust arts scene.

To give a sense of the place, he could have described local landmarks like the giant statue of Otto the Otter. Or the Minnesota-shaped welcome sign next to the Applebee’s. Or the expansive prairie that surrounds the town.

But he did not.

Instead, Mr. Relotius invented a condescending fiction. On the venerated pages of Der Spiegel, a German newsmagazine, Mr. Relotius portrayed Fergus Falls as a backward, racist place whose residents blindly supported President Trump and rarely ventured beyond city limits. He made up details about a young city official. He concocted characters, roadside signs and racially tinged plotlines.

Relotius "invented a fiction" concerning "a backward, racist place." He concocted characters, roadside signs and racially tinged plotlines.

Needless to say, that isn't the fault of other journalists. But among the fictions Relotius published in Der Spiegel, he even offered this:

FURBER AND SMITH: When [Relotius] was exposed, the fact that his portrayal of Fergus Falls was false went public, too, as well as the efforts of some people in town to document what he got wrong.

Soon, the town found itself in the midst of an international furor that it did not ask to be part of. The American ambassador to Germany accused Der Spiegel of a pattern of journalistic malpractice. National and international news outlets have visited the city, about 175 miles northwest of Minneapolis. Painful memories of being lied about have resurfaced.

[...]

The fabrications in the article ranged from the trivial (an account of a foreboding forest that does not exist and a Super Bowl party that did not happen) to the personally devastating (the city administrator was falsely portrayed as a gun-obsessed, romantically challenged man who had never seen the ocean) to the downright inflammatory (Mr. Relotius claimed—falsely, residents say—that there was a sign that said “Mexicans Keep Out” at the entrance to town). He seemed to conflate and invent biographies for different Hispanic people and said “American Sniper” had been playing for months on end at the local movie theater, a claim rebutted by residents.

Surely, Der Spiegel obtained a photograph of that remarkable roadside sign before it published that accusation.

Well, apparently, no, it did not. Nor do Furber and Smith seem entirely willing to say that they know that this "fabrication" (their assessment) really and truly was "false."

Whatever! This report seems to chronicle the latest example of flatly fraudulent fictive "reporting," a type of journalistic malfunction which appears from time to time.

It also chronicles the efforts of some people in Fergus Falls to challenge the fraud. Three cheers for Michele Anderson, whose challenge to Der Spiegel apparently drew no response:

FURBER AND SMITH: Michele Anderson, who works for a local arts nonprofit, said she had been eager to read Mr. Relotius’s work and used Google’s translation service last year to convert the German text to English. The translation was imperfect, but it was immediately clear that the story was a fabrication. When Ms. Anderson saw someone praise the article on Twitter in April 2017, she replied that the story was false, a “hilarious, insulting excuse for journalism.” For more than a year, Der Spiegel did not respond.

[...]

As the truth spread—that the story was not only largely false, but also deeply insulting—residents began weighing their options. City officials discussed whether they had any legal recourse. Ms. Anderson and a friend began compiling a list of the article’s inaccuracies. But unsure what options they had and not wanting to draw more negative attention, residents mostly kept their anger within city limits until Mr. Relotius’s broader misdeeds were exposed this month.

Someone had loved the report on Twitter! There's a lot of that going around!

The Der Spiegel report seems to have been the latest instance of flat-out, fraudulent journalistic invention. In this country, we've had major examples of this type of journalistic fiction in the past thirty years—from Jayson Blair at the New York Times and Stephen Glass at the New Republic, to cite two high-profile examples.

That said, our discourse is awash in commentary which falls just short of this level of fraud. Meanwhile, our upper-end "news reporting" has often been driven by such fiction-based writing, in ways which have changed the course of world history and taken many lives.

The twenty-month coverage of Candidate Gore fell just short of this level of fraud. That coverage sent George W. Bush to the White House and children in Iraq to their deaths.

The coverage of Candidate (Hillary) Clinton often adopted a similar cast. The New York Times' giant, sprawling "news report" about Uranium One fell just short of being outright fraud when it appeared in April 2015. We'd say this ridiculous October 2016 front-page report about the moral greatness of the truth-tellers Flowers and Hamzy didn't fall far behind, based mainly on the three million facts the news report chose to withhold.

The lunacy of this "news reporting" fell just short of outright fraud. That said, there's one big difference between those cases and the case of Fergus Falls:

The fraudulent treatment of Fergus Falls has now been widely debunked and discussed. By way of contrast, the fraudulence of the New York Times cannot be reported or discussed. Any such conduct would be forbidden by the tenets of Hard Pundit Law, by the unyielding code of silence observed within the guild.

Here at this site, we wrote for years, including for twenty months in real time, about the fraudulent coverage of Candidate Gore. But because the fraud was being conducted by the Washington Post and the New York Times, it was then, and it remains today, undiscussable within the system.

In one glorious exception, Vanity Fair published this October 2007 report by Evgenia Peretz, a report which was almost wholly based on our own earlier work. There it was, at full length, in a major publication.

No discussion ensued. For the criminal class which conspired to kill all those kids in Iraq, any such discussion would have constituted a violation of law.

How about that fraudulent report about Hillary Clinton and Uranium One? Here too, the fairly obvious fraudulence has never been discussed in public or explained by the Times.

It has been discussed in private (in effect)! In August 2017, Harvard's Berkman Klein Center published a lengthy, deracinated report beneath this intriguing title:

PARTISANSHIP, PROPAGANDA, & DISINFORMATION
Online Media & the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

Included deep within the report was a lengthy discussion of the role played by the Times report in making Uranium One a major part of anti-Clinton propaganda. That said, the Harvard reported appeared several years too late, and it was written in the abstractified style which seems intended to ensure that it will never be read or discussed by anyone in the outside world.

The authors did find time to praise themselves for their tireless, exhaustively-staffed, well-funded efforts. The report starts like this:

FARIS, ROBERTS, ETLING, BOURASSA, ZUCKERMAN AND BAKLER (8/17): This paper is the result of months of effort and has only come to be as a result of the generous input of many people from the Berkman Klein Center and beyond.

Jonas Kaiser and Paola Villarreal expanded our thinking around methods and interpretation. Brendan Roach provided excellent research assistance. Rebekah Heacock Jones helped get this research off the ground, and Justin Clark helped bring it home. We are grateful to Gretchen Weber, David Talbot, and Daniel Dennis Jones for their assistance in the production and publication of this study.

This paper has also benefited from contributions of many outside the Berkman Klein community. The entire Media Cloud team at the Center for Civic Media at MIT’s Media Lab has been essential to this research.

Natalie Gyenes and Anushka Shah provided research insights and Media Cloud expertise. Rahul Bhargava, Linas Valiukas, and Cindy Bishop built the platform that made this work possible. John Kelly and Vlad Barash provided important insights into the role of social media in the election, leading us to new hypotheses and ideas that shaped the paper’s development. Matt Higgins helped lay a firm foundation of thought and hypotheses upon which this work was completed. Philipp Nowak provided valuable early research assistance.

Participants of Data & Society’s Propaganda & Media Manipulation Workshop in May 2017 provided valuable feedback and critical cross-examination that helped steer this paper to its final version. Thanks to Anthony Nadler for particularly helpful feedback on an early draft of this study.

This study was funded by the Open Society Foundations U.S. Programs. Media Cloud has received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Open Society Foundations.

Who didn't fund this project? Meanwhile, the tireless authors worked "for months," helped by a cast of thousands.

We've worked for free for 21 years. Our debunking of the Times' Uranium One report appeared one day after it first appeared, not more than two years later.

(Two days before the report appeared, we offered these ruminations concerning the very strange business deal from which the report resulted. Such things can be done in real time, though the issues involved won't be discussed by our favorite stars on cable.)

Fergus Falls has had its day in court. The fraudulent report about the town has been identified, acknowledged, discussed.

The larger frauds under which we all live continue along under stifling codes of silence. Simply put, you aren't allowed to know many things. This is roughly the arrangement Chomsky describes as "manufactured consent."

One final point. The fraudulent Der Spiegel report worked from a much-loved novelistic framework. It was all about the racism of Those People, the ones in the other tribe.

Our contemporary liberal world runs on that fuel. Our liberal world runs on tribal loathing, on the loathing of The Others which has always routinely prevailed.

Are we humans really the rational animal? This depressing New York Times report about the inner workings of the Women's March provides a depressing answer to that question.

We humans just aren't all that sharp. In particular, we have a lot of trouble with the logical complexities of "some" versus "all."

This doesn't mean that anyone's evil. It means we're prone to self-defeat through painful error, even Over Here within our progressive tents.

It means we aren't all that sharp. Except when we're seeing ourselves from afar, the truth is, we never have been.

Charles Lane goes to Fergus Falls: Charles Lane was editor of The New Republic during the Stephen Glass era.

Earlier this week, he discussed the Fergus Falls case in the Washington Post. He also discussed the way we liberals love to drop our bombs.

Tomorrow: What Michael Beschloss (oddly) said to applause

These presidential historians today!

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2018

First part of a year-end report: If we were inclined to restart today, we might restart with this New York Times editorial, which is actually an "editorial substitute."

In hard copy, the presentation looks like the day's lone editorial. In fact, it's a signed "Editorial Observer" piece by Bill Saporito, who's identified (though only on line) as "a contributor to the editorial board."

Is a contributor to the editorial board the same thing as a member of the editorial board? As best we can tell, the answer is no.

That said, Saporito's piece has the look, and the positioning, of this morning's lone editorial. Readers of today's print editions will likely think that's what they're reading when they peruse his piece.

For what it's worth, we thought we were reading the day's lone editorial when we read our hard-copy Times! At any rate, along the way, Saporito offers this:

SAPORITO (12/27/18): Mr. Trump is King Minus. Everything he touches turns to lead. And everyone else is at fault but him. He can’t understand it. Didn’t he give Mexico and Canada a great deal in replacing Nafta with Naft2? He thinks so, even though the Canadians fought furiously until they got an agreement they could live with; the Mexicans are still on the fence, if you’ll pardon the pun.

And didn’t he win the trade war with China? The president brays that jobs will be moving here from there, which will make the trade deficit diminish. The reality is that the trade deficit continues to climb, mostly because it helps our economy. What is diminishing instead are sales of soybeans to China, once the largest customer for American farmers. In November, China bought exactly zero soybeans from us. Merry Christmas, Iowa. Does this feel like winning?

In Mr. Trump’s snow-globe reality, our days are merry and bright as long as he’s in charge. It’s only when those other fools interfere—the courts, the Fed, Congress, whoever is chief of staff—that things go wrong. Thus the government shutdown that he bragged he would own he now says belongs to the Democrats. No one is buying that one, not even in his own party. And no one is buying his $5 billion Mexico wall, either. And that includes the Mexicans. Nor should they. The number of people entering the United States from Mexico has been declining for a decade, but Mr. Trump has now wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars placing American troops in Texas to protect us from an immigration threat that doesn’t exist.

Snore! If you're alive on the planet, you're encountered that array of prepackaged editorial observations a million times by now.

As we read Saporito's piece, we thought of the December 24 Deadline: White House broadcast. The Christmas Eve effort was a pre-taped affair. For that reason, it was even more repetitive and scripted than the almost insanely repetitive program's standard daily fare.

Within the tents of our generally useless tribe, everyone knows what to say about Donald J. Trump. Pundits take numbers and stand in line awaiting their chance to recite, just as they did in 1999 and 2000, when their insanely repetitive claims were designed to defeat the very bad person who was Bill Clinton's chosen successor.

This is the way the minds of us the humans tend to work! For ourselves, we think of what Nestor, the seasoned charioteer, told the headstrong Diomedes at the moment of truth on the plains outside Troy:

Few can match your power in battle, Diomedes,
and in council you excel all men your age
But you don't press on and reach a useful end...

In council, the youthful Diomedes exceeded everyone else his age. But, at least in this instance, the vastly more experienced Nestor—"he always gave the best advice"—told Diomedes that he had failed to "reach a useful end."

For our money, it's the greatest fictional scene we know—the scene which has been reenacted the most times in the millennia since it passed into tribal song.

Everyone knows how to repeat the complaints Saporito repeats this morning. You can see them stated, almost insanely, for an hour each weekday afternoon on Deadline: White House.

Our tribe knows how to repeat these complaints. But we're struck by the way our corporate tribal leaders fail to move beyond the obvious to reach a useful end.

In large part, we blame the New York Times itself. Back in January, the newspaper warned us not to say the sorts of things Carl Bernstein said, not for the first time, on last Sunday's Reliable Sources.

Bernstein questioned the president's psychological state. Speaking with CNN's Brian Stelter, he moved beyond rote recitation toward a potentially useful end:

STELTER (12/23/18): Carl, help us connect this fight [about the exit from Syria] to Trump's precarious position overall. To me, James Mattis issued a warning to America with his resignation letter, and that's the other big story this weekend, loss of support for the president. How do you connect these fights?

BERNSTEIN: Well, you just said it right, it's all one big story and that story is about the fitness or unfitness of Donald Trump to be president of the United States. What the Mattis letter has done in a monumental way is to push Republicans into making some real judgments, they're talking to each other, there is coming to be a much greater consensus that he is unfit to be the president of the United States, if you talk to Republicans, that he is unfit on psychological grounds, that he is unfit perhaps because of his contempt for the law and particularly unfit in his conduct of foreign policy in such a way as to be a danger himself.

And this is what Mattis has said, Tillerson has said, McMaster has said. They view the president of the United States as a danger to the national security of the United States...

[...]

I think as journalists that we need to be going to all Republican members of the House and Senate and having serious discussions with them, questions on background, what do they think about the fitness of Donald Trump to be president of the United States. And let's start running detailed stories about what they really think.

[...]

This is not just a question of whether he is going to be impeached, convicted, not convicted. This is about whether or not a consensus is developing that the president of the United States is not fit to serve in a situation such as we have never had in the history of this country.

Read what individuals are saying in the Congress, being quoted as saying he's off the rails. Republicans saying that, not Democrats. "He's off the rails psychologically. He's not stable enough to be president."

These are questions that as journalists we have to look at, not pejoratively, not saying whether we think he's psychologically unfit, but what people of the country think. We also ought to be talking to people in the country about all these things, but also about Republicans particularly and what they say about these questions...

All through the past year, Bernstein has said that journalists should conduct a public discussion concerning Donald J. Trump's psychological state—concerning his mental health.

In Bernstein's view, Trump's lack of stability makes him a danger to the nation, presumably to the world. But alas! In January of this year, the New York Times editorial board said we shouldn't have that discussion, and the rest of the mainstream press corps quickly fell into line.

This undercut the effort by Yale psychiatrist Bandy Lee to initiate such a discussion. Her efforts were thrown under the bus as the Times, predictably enough, said we should ignore the questions she was attempting to raise.

This leaves our pundits repeating their useless daily claims concerning whatever ridiculous thing Trump said or did ten minutes ago. They refuse to reach a (potentially) useful end as they conduct this insanely repetitive pseudo-discussion.

In this morning's New York Times, Saporito repeats the basic points for perhaps the ten millionth time. He repeats the claims they all can repeat, the claims they repeat every day.

Repetition is easy and fun, but does it reach a useful end? As they repeat and repeat and repeat, Donald Trump still holds the nuclear codes, and the generals who were supposed to prevent their use are increasingly absent.

The latest pleasing daily complaint concerns Trump's alleged bone spurs during the Vietnam War. Inevitably, the corps is now claiming to be shocked, shocked by the latest relatively trivial thing they may or may not have learned.

Last night, Don Lemon was shocked by this latest report. This leads us to our mini-topic for this, the last full week of the year:

These presidential historians today! Tomorrow, we'll start a lazy year-end semi-report by showing you what Michael Beschloss recently oddly said.

Tomorrow: Pleasing but blatantly false

The charioteer's fuller tale: He always gave the best advice! In this instance, his advice went exactly like this:

Few can match your power in battle, Diomedes,
and in council you excel all men your age
But you don't press on and reach a useful end.
How young you are—why, you could be my son,
my youngest-born at that, though you urge our kings
with cool clear sense: what you've said is right.

But it's my turn now, Diomedes.
I think I can claim to have some years on you.
So I must speak up and drive the matter home.
And no one will heap contempt on what I say,
not even mighty Agamemnon. Lost to the clan,
lost to the hearth, lost to the old ways, that one
who lusts for the horror of war with his own people.

The charioteer continued from there, chastising even Agamemnon. For ourselves, we think we see a lot of lusting for war with our own people within our own current discussions.

Concerning the spirit of the day after Christmas!

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2018

The desire to give comfort and aid: Excuse us for noticing, but everyone else is still lounging about, so we plan to lounge about today too. We'll probably restart tomorrow.

In place of our normal useless services, we'll remind you of a wonderful question, a question first asked long ago and followed by a pledge:

who found you in the green forest
and were you very sorry to come away?

The question is followed by a pledge, a pledge to give "comfort" (and aid). We're always happy to read and recommend the full text at this time of year.

Who found you in the forest? Although "to each his world is private," it's a wonderful children's question. With everybody lounging about, it's well worth considering today.

BREAKING: Special report concerning tomorrow!

MONDAY, DECEMBER 24, 2018

According to practiced observers: We forgot to mention the fact that tomorrow is Christmas Day.

For that reason, we won't be posting today or tomorrow. Wednesday's a long ways off.

Also this: "the balls the chains red and gold the fluffy threads

i'll give them all to you to hold..."

We frequently recommend it.

BREAKING: Cable star seeks personal peace!

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 22, 2018

Admits she's "slightly obsessed:" Twelve minutes into last night's program, a major corporate cable news star made a peculiar remark:

MADDOW (12/21/18): I mean, we expected to be getting on the air tonight without a clear story to tell about whether or not the entire federal government was going to shut down at midnight.

We expected to be covering, this hour, ongoing wrangling and negotiations, potentially even last-minute votes. That is not the circumstances that we are in, because around dinner time East Coast time tonight, the Senate just decided, "Yeah, we all know this thing's going to shut down anyway. Why fight it? Why stay up late? We're old guys!"

To watch the whole segment, click here.

Maddow is never especially shy about the kind of remarks our team will sometimes denounce as "ageist," though only when such remarks are made by The Others. So it was with last night's wonderfully entertaining remarks about those comical "old guys."

For ourselves, we've never used the term "ageist." We'll just call the remarks in question "stupid" and leave our assessment at that.

That said, it wasn't the wonderful jibe about the "old guys" which seemed so odd to us. We've highlighted the cable star's oddest remark in that passage—her suggestion that she'd been bracing for the possibility that "the entire federal government" might perhaps shut down.

That, of course, was never a possibility, as everyone else on the face of the earth had reported and explained by the time of last night's show. Later in the program, an NBC reporter ran through the basic facts. ("I mean, I know that it's a little bit different in that 75 percent of the government is already funded. This is only going to affect 25 percent of the government.")

Presumably, someone even knew such things on Maddow's staff. This is what the cable star said as she continued, working from prepared text:

MADDOW (continuing directly): So there technically will be a partial government shutdown that initiates as of midnight tonight when funding for the government runs out. It's because there is no deal. There is no $5 billion for the president to build a wall or a moat or steel slats or a decorative pergola on the long southern land border between our country and Mexico. There's none of that. There's no deal.

After floating the idea of a shutdown of the entire government, Maddow now copped to a partial shutdown. So it goes on the increasingly narcissistic program.

Last night, it started like this:

MADDOW: Let us start with a simple thing. Let us start with a news development that is almost pure in its simplicity and its straightforwardness and its crystal clear implications for what should happen and what likely will happen next. As an, as an—

I find this comforting. As a news story, this is just kind of perfect, the way like a pecan pie is perfect, or a sunrise, right?

All right. Today, this news story, I have found, has been sort of my, my order in the midst of chaos. You ready to becalm yourself with me right now? All right.

Right now, the White House chief of staff is John Kelly...

The Maddow Show routinely concerns the feelings of Rachel Maddow. These reports will be mixed with endless speculation about how much time various Others will have to spend in jail.

Few other things matter on this show. For example:

According to the Nexis archives, the cable star who fronts this program hasn't said the word"Yemen" all year. Last night, she burned the first twelve minutes of her show with a rather selective report about a trivial incident which doesn't seem to be fully understood at the present time.

That said, the somewhat poorly understood story involves a deputy to Kelly. The host dished out some selective facts. After 12 minutes of time had been killed (with speculations about jail time ahead), we viewers got to hear this:

MADDOW: So like, this is how I relax now. This is what counts as like my happy place. It's like a relaxing, comforting turn in the news these days.

It is like people upload it to Twitter like those pictures, those like little GIFs of like hedgehogs eating kernels of corn. It's like this is the equivalent of that.

Zone out and think about this for a while. Oh, garden variety, potentially criminal public corruption at the highest levels of the White House staff. That feels like a place of rest right now, which is telling about what else is going on right now in the news.

I mean, we expected to be getting on the air tonight without a clear story to tell about whether or not the entire federal government was going to shut down at midnight...

Viewers heard that odd remark about the entire government shutting down. Luckily, we also got to learn about this narcissistic multimillionaire cable clown's "happy place."

Later, we were treated to such inside information again. Maddow routinely seems disturbed by the thought of sexual activity among The Others. Almost surely, that explains the "slight obsession" she mentioned in this pair of teases:

MADDOW: It's been a whole bunch of interesting court filings related to the Mueller probe today. I will tell you we`re going to get to that a little bit later on this hour too, including the lifting of the gag order in the Maria Butina case. I am slightly obsessed with that case and that element of it. We will have more on that, coming up.

MADDOW: All right. Still ahead, a mystery developments in a Russian meddling case that is not one of the Robert Mueller cases, but this happened today. I'm slightly obsessed with it. That story is next.

It's always important for viewers to know what Maddow is slightly obsessed with—though if you can't spot the obsessions from watching her work, you may be absorbing too much of the tribe.

Let's say it again. According to the Nexis records, the host of this particular "cable news" show hasn't said the word "Yemen" even one time this year. Tens of thousands of children have been starved to death as part of that U.S.-linked war, but she keeps talking about how trivial players are maybe possibly and perhaps going to spend time in jail, especially if we don't consider the facts she may choose not to mention.

It's her place of peace! That, and she may have a "slight obsession" with Butina's boy friend, who may be facing some sort of indictment. (That's the gist of the new, minor fact about which she's slightly obsessed.)

She doesn't have a Butina sex tape yet, but if she gets one, she'll likely play it again and again, covering her ears like a little girl and pretending she doesn't want to. To us liberals, this seems like good fun!

She's slightly obsessed with Butina's sex life, but she's never mentioned the children of Yemen. At the present time, through no immediate fault on our own, this is who and what we liberals have become.

The little girl who got hit by the napalm in Vietnam and ran screaming away from her village? She wouldn't have made the cut on the Maddow Show. These are the values of our tribe, of the big giant stars we most love.

And no, this isn't all Maddow's "fault." Like so many others before her, she's been enabled in this descent every step of the way.

A note concerning our top career liberals: Just as they never criticized Chris Matthews or Maureen Dowd, they will never mention or criticize Maddow's downward spiral. Just as they never mentioned Olbermann's rank misogyny—except when they were speaking in private, on Ezra Klein's JournoList. (Their silence wasn't Klein's fault.)

Dearest darlings, use your heads! Careerist codes are in effect. This is the way we highly "rational" humans reason.

FOOLS FOR PARADOX: Lord Russell's paradox drew him in!

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 21, 2018

The land of "abstract objects:" Again, let's start with our basic questions. For example:

In a world which is crawling with top-flight logicians, why is our public discourse bedeviled by hopeless illogic? From 1994 through 1996, why did no logician step in to critique this iconic claim by Newt Gingrich:

No one is cutting the Medicare program. We're just slowing the rate at which the program will grow.

For roughly two years, the public discourse came to a halt as reporters and pundits struggled with that claim by the Gingrich-led Republican party. Our journalists were hopelessly overmatched by the claim. But where were our many elite logicians?

In some ways, our question is easily answered. Our elite logicians concern themselves with loftier topics than these. As we showed you just last week, W. D. Hart offered these thoughts in his 2010 book, The Evolution of Logic:

HART (page 59): Perhaps more generally a quantifier is a second-level function whose value at an (n + 1)-ary first-level concept is an n-ary concept, unless n is zero, in which case its value is a truth value, an object. In that case, quantifiers would be second-level functions sometimes having first-level concepts as values and sometimes objects as values. When the value of a first-level concept at an object is truth, Frege says the object falls under the concept. Perhaps the concept:falls-under is a binary second-level concept whose first argument is an object and whose second is a first-level concept. In that case, second-level concepts could also have arguments of different levels.

When issues like these are being resolved, few will have time for the affairs of the world.

Then too, we have Professor's Goldstein's explanation of Godel's incompleteness theorems. According to the New York Times review of Goldstein's 2005 book, this was magically lucid work:

GOLDSTEIN (page 175): The Godel number that will correspond to the sequence of p1 followed by p2 is:

GN(p1, p2) = 7387398776738467398827343980675846758

Through Godel's inspired contrivances, all of the logical relations that between propositions in the formal system become arithmetic relations expressible in the arithmetical language of the system itself. This is the essence of the heart-stopping beauty of the whole thing. So if, for example, wff1 logically entails wff2, then GN(wff1) will bear some purely arithmetical relation to GN(wff2). Suppose, say, that it can be shown that if wff1 logically entails wff2, then GN(wff2) is a factor of GN(wff1). We would then have two ways of showing that wff1 logically entails wff2; we could use the rules of the formal system to deduce wff2 from wff1; or we could show that GN(wff1) can be obtained from GN(wff2) by multiplying by an integer. Suppose that GN(wff1) = 195589 and GN(wff2) = 317. 317 is a factor of 195589, since 317 multiplied by 617 = 195589. So that wff1 logically entails wff2 could be demonstrated either by using the formal rules of proof to arrive at wff2 from wff1, or, alternatively, by using the rules of arithmetic to arrive at GN(wff1) = 195589 by multiplying 617 by 317 = GN(wff2). The metasyntactic and the arithmetic collapse into one another.

According to the Times review, that was part of an exposition which was magically lucid for the general reader. That said, when logicians have matters like this to discuss, who has time for the piddling issues affecting the health of tens of millions of people?

For better or worse, our elite logicians have developed elite concerns. They leave the affairs of the world to people like the Washington Post's Monica Hesse, who recently explored the metaphysics, hermeneutics and ontology of Stephen Miller's deeply troubling yet highly evocative hair.

Our journalists have been exploring such pitiful topics for decades. Our logicians live in the clouds, perhaps in the land where numbers and circles have the "perfect, timeless existence" alluded to in The New Yorker's unintentionally comic review of Goldstein's surprising book.

So it goes with us rational animals in this, the deeply dangerous era of Donald J. Trump. According to Professor Horwich, this lunacy persists, at least in part, for an all-too-human reason:

When the later Wittgenstein came along and offered advances in rational conduct, our philosophers turned him away, concerned because he'd said that their previous efforts had been built on definable types of illusions. According to Professor Horwich, the guild has chosen to turn him out, to reaffirm the old ways.

This brings us to the second major "paradox" explored in Professor Goldstein's 2005 book, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel. On Wednesday, we explored "the liar's paradox," a form of chicken-scratching on the approximate level of the tree which famously falls in the forest when no one is around.

The notion that modern logic is built around the mysteries of this ancient riddle—well sir, Trump can sing the entire theme song from Green Acres before the laughter subsides.

Goldstein, a ranking philosophy professor, takes the liar's paradox very, very seriously. Later in her favorably reviewed and blurbed book, she describes "Russell's paradox," the conundrum which convinced the young Ludwig Wittgenstein to give up aeronautics and study logic instead:

GOLDSTEIN (page 90-91): Wittgenstein came from one of the wealthiest and most culturally elite families of Vienna, "the Austrian version of the Krupps, the Carnegies, the Rothschilds, whose lavish palace on Alleegasse had hosted concerts by Brahms and Mahler..." He was, in his intensity, preoccupations, ambitions and conflicts, indelibly stamped by the sensibilities of that intense, preoccupied, ambitious and conflicted city. While studying aeronautical engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin, he had learned of Russell's paradox, and became interested in the foundations of mathematics.

So what the heck was Russell's paradox? In truth, it was basically a tricked-out version of that ancient Greek/Cretan tale:

GOLDSTEIN (continuing directly): Russell's famous paradox is of the self-referential variety. The liar's paradox—this very sentence is false—is of the same variety. We get into trouble because some linguistic item talks about itself, at least potentially, and by reason of this self-referentiality we end up both asserting that some statement is true and that it is also false, which is logically impossible if anything is.

This very sentence is false! Should we regard that as a "statement," as Goldstein does in that passage, or as a silly parlor trick? To see us vote for the latter approach, click here for Wednesday's report.

Regarding Russell's "famous paradox," Goldstein proceeds to the place where the rubber meets the road. As she does, it seems to us that we can hear the laughter of the gods:

GOLDSTEIN (continuing directly): Russell's paradox concerns the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. Sets are abstract objects that contain members, and some sets can be members of themselves. For example, the set of all abstract objects is a member of itself, since it is an abstract object. Some sets (most) are not members of themselves. For example, the set of all mathematicians is not itself a mathematician—it's an abstract object—and so is not a member of itself., Now we form the concept of the set of all sets that aren't members of themselves and we ask of this set: is it a member of itself? It either is or it isn't, just as the problematic sentence of the liar's paradox either is or isn't true. But if the set of all sets that aren't members of themselves is a member of itself, then it's not a member of itself, since it contains only sets that aren't members of themselves. And, if it's not a member of itself, then it is a member of itself, since it contains all the sets that aren't members of themselves. So it's a member of itself if and only if it's not a member of itself. Not good.

"Russell's paradox concerns the set of all sets that are not members of themselves." As Goldstein correctly notes, this is the famous conundrum which lured the young Wittgenstein to Cambridge.

Let's turn to Goldstein's account. For our money, it's amazing that a ranking philosophy professor could have produced such work in 2005, some 52 years after the publication of the later Wittgenstein's definitive text, Philosophical Investigations.

It's even more amazing that three academic stars—Pinker, Greene and Lightman—would have rushed to the back of her book to blurb her lucidity and praise her insight and skill.

To our ear, almost every part of that paragraph evokes the laughter of the gods. "Sets are abstract objects that contain members?" On the steepest slopes of Olympus, how the gods must have roared!

In our view, it's a remarkable fact that elite logicians still traffic in piddle like this. For today, we'll only enjoy the mirth which comes to us when we read this one small part of Goldstein's presentation:

"Sets are abstract objects..."

Sets are abstract objects! Before we comment on that peculiar choice of words, let's get clear on one point. Goldstein is speaking here of a particular type of "set," though she fails to say so.

Your grandmother's special china set isn't, in any normal sense, some sort of "abstract object." It's a collection of physical objects—tea cups, saucers and plates—which are taken out of her cabinet for use on special occasions.

John Doe's full set of 1958 baseball cards is also, in the most straightforward sense, a collection of physical objects. And sure enough! Even as we sit here typing, Macy's is offering low, low prices on "Calvin Klein Modern Comforter Sets."

There too, the sets which you can buy at Macy's are collections of physical objects. No "abstract objects" are listed as part of the deal!

In fairness, Professor Goldstein isn't talking about that type of "set." She's discussing a different type of "set"—a type of set she chooses to describe as an "abstract object."

Tell the truth! Do you have any idea what an abstract object might be? Do you know why a person would choose to employ such an odd choice of words?

In our view, the type of "sets" to which Goldstein refers are more accurately described as "imaginary collections." You can imagine "the set of all mathematicians," though it would be hard to agree on, and list, all their names.

Once someone has explained what an "abstract object" is, you can even imagine "the set of all abstract objects," though you'd never be able to list every such set.

Russell's paradox concerns the set of all sets that are not members of themselves! In our view, it also concerns grown men and women, typically of a certain class, amusing themselves by playing with dolls while ignoring the affairs of the world.

These woods are silly, and not very deep. Again and again, then again and again, Goldstein insists on the opposite view of the world which can be created when we pretend to address the imagined perils of "self-referential paradox," which causes the mind to crash.

"This problem that had stumped the great Lord Russell was obviously something worth thinking about." So Goldstein writes on page 93, explaining why the youthful Wittgenstein was drawn in by this puzzle.

Having said that, alas! By the time he wrote his first, early book, the still-youthful Wittgenstein had kicked Russell's paradox to the curb. Goldstein keeps rolling her eyes at such heretical work. According to Professor Horwich, our elite logicians are like that.

Our journalists deal with clothing and hair; with questions of who may or may not have had sex on one occasion in 2006; and of course with invented quotations which help advance preferred story lines. Our logicians deal with the set of all sets not members of themselves!

In this way, the dumbing proceeds. Eventually, after the lovin' is done, Donald J. Trump gets elected.